


cause i'm awful to see

by bareunloveliness



Category: Frühlings Erwachen | Spring Awakening - Frank Wedekind
Genre: Cancer, F/M, Hospitalization, Mild Gore, dying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-02 00:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16775563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bareunloveliness/pseuds/bareunloveliness
Summary: Ilse and Max sit down at his hospital bed to write the last thing they want to.





	cause i'm awful to see

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beg_YourPardon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beg_YourPardon/gifts).



> This is based off of the askblogs @ask-bohemian-ilse and @askmaxvontrenk on Tumblr. You don't have to follow them to get it.

There was nothing poetic about the sterile scent of the white, consistent blinking like a headlight or resting child, empty hospital. It wasn't beautiful in any sense, not even a twisted one. It wasn't romantic, the way that couples held onto each other as they took in their final breaths in harmony, knowing that when one died, the other would be soon to go as well. The taste of salty tears filled the mouths of all who worked there, watching more fall dead than Hades himself. 

_ It's funny,  _ Ilse thought as she silently entered the creaky old elevator.  _ For something so un-poetic, I just romanticized the hell of out it in my head.  _ It was the only way she could get by. If she took a moment to really think about the horror of being in a place filled with so much death and disease, she would never come back. 

Max needed her to come back.

Hanschen wasn't enough to keep him alive. They were best friends, and there was always a chance of more, but he needed Ilse. Ilse kept in grounded in the reality that he might not get out of the hospital. A place that was most definitely full of ghosts might get another.

She carried with her today a sketchbook. She wasn't going to draw, but it was the best paper she had and it was all too fitting on an occasion like this. She carried a pink fuzzy pen with her, although it wrote in purple ink. She switched all the inks a few years ago and never bothered to switch them back. Besides, she lost most of the pens in the set. On the sketchbook's cover sat a photo of her and Max in a photo booth, laughing. It was taken the day before he was diagnosed with stage two cancer.

He hadn't smiled, not like that, since then. He hadn't a reason.

She knocked gently on the door to his room, where he was resting. He just had another round of chemotherapy treatments, but was surprisingly stable and awake. Fleetwood Mac was quietly playing from his phone as he hummed along. He wasn't the biggest fan of Stevie Nicks, but knew that Ilse would make him play it when she arrived. If she let him call all the shots, he would feel far more sick and dead than he already was. It was a return to normalcy, for her to play her music, that both of them strived for.

"Another lonely day," she sang quietly as she took the seat next to the bed, holding his hand. "How are you feeling?

"Like I have cancer."

She cracked the smallest smile, adoring his quick wit, even in struggling times. "I brought the paper. Do you want to start?"

"I suppose."

' "To whom it may concern," she pretended to write as she read aloud, knowing he would never start it that way. It was too formal.

"To the motherfuckers that I love," he corrected her as she wrote it down. There would be an assortment of f-bombs, considering this wasn't official in the slightest, thanks to the lack of notary. His parents would respect his wishes though, even if it wasn't written in stone. "If you're reading this, you finally got rid of me."

"I'm not writing that!" she laughed, writing it anyway. "If we wanted to get rid of you, Maxy, I would have poisoned you three years ago. You wouldn't have noticed and you'd be buried and rotting in my backyard."

"Maybe you just poisoned me with a tumor; a slower, more painful death."

"Aw, Maxy. You know I like it fast."

"Can you stop being horny while we write my goddamn will? I want to leave my childhood pictures to my mom. She'd want them."

"Okay, that's fair." Ilse wrote his request, but more eloquently than he was wording it. She kept the nuances of his voice in it though, knowing that he would rather have no will at all than one stuffy and written by some seedy businessman who was probably cheating on his wife. "Anything for your dad?"

"He can have a pile of my shit. Better, cut open my bladder and stomach and dump them on his car. On the leather seats. If you need to break in, use my skull."

She laughed, writing feverishly. "That was creative. And graphic."

"Thanks, I try. Give my sister… I don't think I have anything she'd want. She'd want something though."

"You're right," she paused. "Do you think she'd want your clothes?"

"Ilse, Hot Topic wouldn't even want my clothes."

"What about your books?" she asked. "She's always reading."

"She reads them more than I do." He chuckled. "Yeah, she can have my books. Especially my childhood books. I don't think mom ever read her Winnie the Pooh and honestly, that's a crime." Ilse scribbled down Mina's name and the title of the series, as she begin to cry. "Ilse, baby, whoa, whoa, what's going on?"

"You really might die."

She had known this. There was no way for her to not known this. He had been battling this for six months now, but she thought they would have gotten rid of it. It was a benign tumor at first. She didn't think it would still be happening. There's a moment where it really dawns on a person that not only are they going to die, but the people around them will too. And one of you will attend the other's funeral.

"I know, baby."

"I don't want to go to your funeral," she sniffled, imagining him in a cold casket. She'd never seen a dead body before. She didn't want to.

Max paused. "You don't have to. But even if you don't come, I'm want it to be a celebration. Write this down. While Maxwell Von Trenk does not want anyone to celebrate his death or pretend like it didn't happen, every party at the funeral gets exactly thirty minutes to cry. After that point, anyone who can be described as depressed, broken, morose, or half considerable to be teary will be asked to leave. There will be horrible punk pop music from the late nineties and early two-thousands playing from a live DJ. He requests that the food be covered in salt. To end off the event, he asks that "Cancer" by My Chemical Romance be played. Anyone who doesn't cry gets to split his money evenly."

"That's horrible," she said, laughing at the twisted humor as she copied his request, word for word. "I can't believe I'm not going to get your money."

"It's okay, because I'm leaving you everything else."

"What?"

"My laptop, my notebooks, my weed, everything. It's all left for you. I don't want to talk about this anymore and you can decide what goes to my parents and my brothers. You'll know what they'll want when the time comes. And everything else is yours." He was firm in his decision. If anyone deserved to go through his belongings and see who he truly was, it was Ilse. She stood by him and deserved to see the parts of him that the world didn't. The objects we own see us at our worst. They have secret stashes of chocolate and angsty poems and razors and everything in between. Going through his room was a task that he would entrust only Ilse with. Not even Mina could touch anything.

Tears welled in Ilse's eyes as she wrote that down. She wasn't crying for the great gain; she would rather not know Max at all, to go back in time and never meet him, than to have him die. Digging through his stuff would be hell for her. She would relapse and spend many sleepless nights crying. It would be the worst thing she had ever done.

She was crying because it would be the most important.


End file.
